I've switched away from Nvidia around 2008 due to poor Linux support. Been on AMD ever since (now running the flagship model from a year ago, the 7900xtx or whatever it's called).
Won't personally miss Nvidia, but we need competition in the space to keep prices 'reasonable' (although they haven't been reasonable for some years), and to push for further innovation.
Disagree, it's not _just_ practice. You can do something for 10,000 hours but never actively try to improve. Does that mean you're now more senior because you had more volume of practice?
e.g, let's say someone spends 10k hours doing just 'addition and subtraction' problems on 2 digit numbers. Are they now better at maths than someone who spent 0.1k hours but doing a variety of problems?
To grow as a software engineer, you need to have volume + have this be outside of your comfort zone + actively try to improve/challenge yourself.
Apart from this, I do agree it's not 'innate talent' that drives someone to become a senior engineer, and I think anyone with the right attitude / mindset can do so.
You are well-intending, but don't do that for factual information. I have seen discussions derail because of hallucinated parliamentary history; and the concept of truth became irrelevant.
Yeah, it's obviously a gun control issue. But the US has such a deeply ingrained cultural association with owning guns, and thinking that this means "freedom" in case the government turns on the people lol, that I doubt banning them happens in our lifetime.
> There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
You don't need to ban them, though. Isn't that the actual lesson at the end of _Bowling For Columbine_? That Canada has a huge number of guns and isn't so fucked up?
What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns:
Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
(Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.)
Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance".
Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all".
Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms.
Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out.
Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness.
Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are.
And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns.
You act like guns some weird anachronism, but from my perch, it seems that the need for civilized people to maintain firearms is increasing, not decreasing.
Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians?
If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order.
In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
Allowing US style gun proliferation creates a chicken and egg problem:
How can you prevent these rape gangs from accessing the same weapons? They are not caught, prosecuted and banned from obtaining guns? Even if they are, there will be more guns to steal and circulate in either case.
The answer is laws, but you say they are not working perfectly. So rape gangs will be armed rape gangs next.
When I visited Stockholm ~17 years ago, all shops were displaying valuable items in steel cages anyway (e.g.: TVs were "locked" in heavy-duty steel frames to prevent "removal"), so the problem runs older than the immigration policy gained momentum.
"I need my guns to defend myself from the (((barbarian hordes)))" is exactly the kind of rhetoric that leads the rest of the planet treats gun nuts like the nuts they are. Unfortunately for the US, the US valorizes this particular psychosis
In my world, a civilized person is one who upholds peaceable society, and a barbarian is one who uses force to upend that society. They're not hordes, but they are barbarians.
> immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England […] Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
I don't think you understand the nature of the "rape gang" problem —- what it actually refers to, how it works, and why arming a populace wouldn't do a thing to stop it.
Because the USA has this exact same problem (low-level organised crime gangs sexually exploiting naïve, broke or drug-addicted young teenagers in deprived settings) and gun ownership didn't fix it.
The "rape gangs" are not some roving crime phenomenon that turns up at your door and can be dissuaded by waving a gun.
So yes. Not only do we not extrajudicially shoot rapists because vigilante violence doesn't do anything useful, arming a whole population would not stop this problem in deprived environments in cities. It hasn't in yours.
> Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do.
In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
By the time the opportunity arises to actually do anything about it, a whole load of "conservatives" will be furiously denying that they ever were. In some cases to tribunals and commissions.
Nobody should give the slightest respect or deference to those ideals if invoked by anyone who supported the Republican party after "very fine people on both sides". There is nothing "conservative" about 99% of people who claim the label, and there's nothing moral about their position.
They can either organise with the gun fetishists or take the opportunity to separate from them. But there's no reason to suggest that conservatism in its true form has anything to do with looney gun fetishists who pose with guns in Christmas cards.
All of this can be done without changing the fundamental right to bear or own guns.
I voted Trump three times. He won. America disagrees with you. Most Republicans own guns. It's time to accept that your shaming tactics deployed over the last decade don't work. Our 'side' is more than happy to have yours stop coming to Christmas. You even fittingly repeat the "fine people" hoax, lol.
My background is in computer science and philosophy. But philosophy was always about pure interest and not career prospect.
If I had to pivot in 2025, I’d probably go for psychology. I’m interested in that, I enjoy the idea of more directly helping people and have myself been tremendously helped by psychologists the past years.
Honestly given that the thing gets brought up about five times per day by absolutely anyone for any conceivable reason I think it's the opposite. The real dystopian picture of the future is getting hit on the head with a copy of 1984, forever.
There are no banned books in America. Not spending taxpayer money forcibly taken from citizens on books they disagree with for public school libraries is far from banning books.
If you are okay with a book indoctrinating kids with far left ideology, why not put in copies of far right books to balance it out?
No one wants kids indoctrinated in culture war garbage.
It seems to have mainly come up in discussions about banned books, rather than discussions about popular fascist movements, so it might not be saying what most people would first assume.
The US has shifted to becoming an authoritarian fascist state. It’s not surprising that people reference another prominent authoritarian fascist manifesto.
I regularly use soulseek to download archival copies of music that I pay for. The artist makes their money, and I don’t have to worry about my account access.
Won't personally miss Nvidia, but we need competition in the space to keep prices 'reasonable' (although they haven't been reasonable for some years), and to push for further innovation.
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